First, a treat. The video above is a short, sweet interview with Shirley Tucker, who worked as a book cover designer at Faber and Faber – alongside Bertold Wolpe – from the late 1950s until the 1980s. She was responsible for countless classic modernist jacket designs, including, perhaps most famously, the original 1966 edition of The Bell Jar.

Perhaps we could attempt to judge the novel free of the weight of its author's tragic life story? There are good arguments to be had about the desirability of separating the author from her work, but still I initially agreed with PickledShrew. I thought there might be real interest in aiming for an "innocent" reading of The Bell Jar. Or at least, I did until I started thinking about the logisitics. Consider the following:

– Like her protagonist Esther Greenwood, Plath came from Boston

– Like Esther, Plath lost her father when she was young

– Like Esther, Plath won an internship on a glamorous New York magazine in 1953, Mademoiselle. (Wikipedia even informs me that) in a: "2006 interview, Joanne Greenberg said that she had been interviewed in 1986 by one of the women who had worked on Mademoiselle with Plath in the college guest editors group. The woman claimed that Plath had put so many details of the students' real lives into The Bell Jar that 'they could never look at each other again', and that it had caused the breakup of her marriage and possibly others." While I'm relaying trivia, it's also interesting to note that Joan Didion and Ann Beattie had both previously been on the Mademoiselle scheme. The novelist Diane Johnson was there at the same time as Plath. And it published writing by Dylan Thomas and Truman Capote among others. It was a seriously good opportunity, in other words. For some people, anyway …)

– Like Esther, Plath also failed to get onto a creative writing course later that same summer (Frank O'Connor's at Harvard). She too left her mother a note saying she had gone "for a long walk" and then tried to kill herself by taking sleeping pills and hiding in her basement crawlspace, as recalled so memorably in the poem Lady Lazarus

She also underwent a course of ECT. She was also taken on by a rich literary patron. (Philomena Guinea seems to be a thinly disguised Olive Higgins Prouty). This novel is, in short, far closer to its author's life than many so-called autobiographies. The biggest work of fiction is possibly the name she initially wrote it under, Victoria Lucas – a precaution she took because she didn't want her mother to know it was about her, and which proved wise when the older woman worked to suppress the book's publication – thus demonstrating how close to the bone it must have been.

(Plath Snr contended that the descriptions of real people in the novel represented "the basest ingratitude" towards the people caricatured in the book, herself included).

Meanwhile, the shroud of death hangs over the The Bell Jar. How not to take Sylvia's suicide into account when reading about Esther's various attempts? Even her otherwise hilarious lists of the best ways to kill herself (almost as funny as the opening of Harold And Maude) bring a lump to the throat. The book struck me as raw, powerful and upsetting. But it was impossible to know how much of that was due to the knowledge of Plath's tragedy, and how much the writing.

The following, for example, hit me in the gut:

"Then something bent down and took hold of me and shook me like the end of the world. Whee-ee-ee-ee-ee, it shrilled, through an air crackling with blue light, and with each flash a great jolt drubbed me till I thought my bones would break and the sap fly out of me like a split plant.

I wondered what terrible thing it was that I had done."

Plath herself underwent such ECT. It probably didn't help her much at all. In fact, even with my scant medical knowledge it seems clear that she was largely misdiagnosed and mistreated – and not just by her mother. Naturally such knowledge adds poignancy to the descriptions of Esther's suffering when she, like Plath, was just 19. How could it not? In the end, it seemed to me that there was no point trying to separate the book from the life. Not least because the book might as well be a suicide note.

But then, even as I wrote that, I knew it was wrong – and that I was doing just what PickledShrew warns us against. To describe the book in such terms is too limiting. It ignores the fact that so much of it is so funny. That so much of it is nasty, and that Esther can be vicious as well as a victim. That so much of it, in spite of everything, is about the promise of youth. That so much of it is about an intelligent young woman making her own way in the world and who, as the famous line goes: "hated the idea of serving men in any way".

"'Protofeminist martyr' is my shorthand description, not of Plath, but of the figure into which she has been made by others after her death. I don't think it's unfair to observe this, since Plath-the-martyr for a long time submerged Plath-the-poet in public perception.

"Plath isn't the only figure whose real achievement has been obscured or distorted by the non-literary agendas of commentators after the fact. Another example is the way in which the sexual abuse that Virginia Woolf undoubtedly suffered has come to seem more important to some than her writing.

"The fact that Plath suffered periods of extreme mental instability and was subjected to early and experimental forms of treatment doesn't enforce any particular reading. It certainly doesn't demand to be read as a parable of the victimisation of women by medical patriarchs."

True, it doesn't demand that at all. This is a book that is open to many interpretations - and one that is correspondingly rewarding. But a study of any of that will have to wait until next time. I've said enough for now. And like just about every other Plath critic, I've said nearly all of it about her life rather than her words on the page …